Bios Virus?!

Hi everyone, pleasure to be back on Wilders'

A friend of mine just told me he'd had to replace his hard drive on laptop. The reason is he ran a cdrom without being covered by an AV, and got infected.

The symptoms were: slowing down system, then system getting to a complete halt. When trying to reboot, it wouldn't work, then displayed the bios screen. My friend entered, and realized the hard drive was no longer detected - no primary master were found. He tried to set bios-default-setup back, but it didn't solve the problem. Using the dos dir command, he got the hard drive content displayed, so the hd wasn't physically destroyed, as one might have suspected at first.

He tried to reinstall xp, but, logically from what precedes, it would not work either 'cause the hd was no longer recognized.

My friend got Kaspersky AV to protect his new hd...

Anyway, my questions are: what type of virus could have caused this, and, more interesting, what could have been done instead of physically removing and replacing the hd, knowing the hd was no longer recognized or perceived by the bios?

Thanks for your thoughts on that one....

Rgds

 

My thoughts are it was a Hard Drive Failure and NOT a virus, it simply died.

I have seen this many a time, the slowing down, before it dies...

Cheers

 

Hi

Thanks for your answer....

What's odd is that the laptop was not necessarily old, perhaps one year or two...

Also, it started with that specific cdrom... or at least, it seemed so - but you're right, I didn't analyze the cd myself, so, it will remain a mystery.

Is it usual for a young drive to die off this way?

 

A drive can die within days, within 6 months, a year or 2, 3, 4, 5 or more. It is man made and with that these things happen, just part and parcel of owning a computer. This is why backing up is crucial, your data, your responsibility is what we tell customers, some learn this straight off, some learn AFTER loosing data the first time, others never learn...

Hope this helps...

Cheers